Lee Radziwill Eternal Style Icon

 

Lee Redziwill, American socialite, interior decorator, actress, and mostly known for being the younger sister of Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Born into a world of privilege, Lee spent her summers on the beaches of the Hamptons and Newport... By the early 60s, she married a polish prince, maybe to spite the First Lady, maybe to cement herself as a power house of her own. Her life was not all roses, she had it all... Success, failure, loves, multiple divorces, even alcoholism.   

Lee captivated the public as one of Truman Capote's swans... she was romantically linked to Peter Beard, Aristotle Onassis, Richard Meier, and even rumored to have had it on with Mick Jagger! I read about her extensively just to have an idea of how she lived her life, what made her tick, and what got her to what she is now. Obviously her main troubles were her rivalry with her sister Jackie, and her rocky relationship with her mom: "My mother endlessly told me I was too fat, that I wasn’t a patch on my sister." However her tiffs with her children and both the deaths of nephew John F. Kennedy Jr., whom she adored, and her own son Anthony shortly after, were what drove Lee to depression... And because every story has a silver lining, Lee was convinced that these tragedies were signs to put her on a different path. In an interview with The New York Times style magazine, Lee talked about regrets: 

"Regrets? I think everyone has regrets, and people who say they haven't are either liars... or narcissists. There have been many things in my life to have regrets about, in the sense I wish I could have changed them, or somehow made them not happen. What I don’t have is envy. I'm perfectly content at this time of my life. I've done so many fascinating things and the greatest joy is that I continue to do interesting things and meet fascinating people. Working for Diana Vreeland at Harper's Bazaar was a great learning curve. Working in P.R. for Giorgio Armani taught me a lot about that particular — I almost said ‘peculiar’ — industry. Really, the most fulfilling roles have been my friendships — Berenson, Nureyev, Peter, even Andy Warhol because he was so wildly different — then, and now Bernard-Henri Lévy and his wife, Arielle Dombasle, and Giambattista Valli, and Diego Della Valle, who are all angelic to me."

  

Lee Radziwill's style was classic Americana of the 60s and early 70s. Polished, rich, Parisian, forward yet classically eloquent... I was touched by her journey. Sometimes what we see as perfect, is only an illusion or a reflection of our own misconceptions.